My Twitter Experience So Far

I started with 0 (zero) followers and I now have 13 followers. Is that good news? I don’t know. Is that an unlucky number—probably not. I am following 24 “Tweeters” (or whatever you call them).

For those who don’t know what (the hell) I’m talking about, Twitter is an online service that’s sort of a cross between instant messaging (IM) and a blog.

At least that’s how someone described it, so I’ll go with that. You set up your profile, then you send messages (tweets) out to your followers or whomever may happen to find you on Twitter.Your tweets are limited to 140 characters; sometimes people forget and their tweets get truncat..

You find new people to follow by looking at their list of followers and begin following them (those on the list). Sounds confusing, but that’s how it works (easy to figure out).

Or you can let Twitter find people to follow by looking at the Suggested Users tab under Find People. That’s how I found Brent Spiner of Star Trek TNG, who just happened to be in the same high school graduating class as I. He has more than 70,000 followers—wow.

Some people send too many tweets, like every five minutes or so--just not that interesting usually. You can stop following anyone at any time with just a click; and you can stop (“block”) someone from following you if you want to.

Here’s a sample of a couple of recent tweets from some of those I’m following:

“Antarctic ice sheet nears melting tipping point.”

“Listening to Benny Goodman.”

Hardly what I consider riveting. Here is one from NPR on Twitter that is at least a little informational:

“On this day in 1974, Buckley is first Rightwing to split from Nixon.” Maybe not so riveting either.

I’ve been sending tweets mostly about art and what art thing I’m doing that day. I send very few tweets in a day, usually one or two. I plan to branch out, so today I tweeted about the South by Southwest (SWSX) live music festival currently going on in Austin, Texas, USA.

I started following Joel Stein today (joelastein on Twitter). I like his irreverent and what I think are funny, funny columns in TIME Magazine. He has 14 followers, but he hasn’t sent one tweet (as of today).

Oh well, I’ll keep tweeting and see what can happen in 140 characters.